You have three ways to be hired in this market. Which one do you choose?

I’ve been hiring design and research talent for 8 years.

I’ve gone through 2 hyper-growths, 2 hiring freezes, 1 COVID extravaganza of the market, and now the market falling under geopolitical and AI pressure.

I spent 2,5 years scaling Miro’s design team, hiring across senior, staff, principal, and director roles. In my first year as a design recruitment agency, I worked with companies like Wise, Sanity, and Monday.com.

I’ve advised 100+ designers, researchers, and leaders over the last year. Some of them were coming from Atlassian, Apple, or Airbnb.

I’ve educated 100+ designers, researchers, and leaders on my MAVEN Job Search course.

1. The easiest way for you

2. The most solid way

3. The shittiest way that most of you are using

Yesterday I jumped on a call with a person who reached out for help. They shared that they are looking for a role and they don’t really know how to network. They wanted to go for face-to-face events, maybe conferences and meetups.

My simple answer: not really.

I have never hired anyone from a meetup, and I can imagine that you’ve never been hired from a meetup too.

Conferences are overwhelming, overcrowded, and lots of people get into conversations before you actually manage to make a connection. Zoom calls are much better. It’s great to meet at conferences with people that you already know. Making new connections there is not as easy.

Here are the three ways you can actually be discovered:

A recruiter and a hiring manager decide on the role, and then you are found on LinkedIn. This is the easiest way for you because the company gets in touch. You don’t need to apply or interview for them to get back.

Does it happen a lot? No.

Does it happen to everyone? Absolutely not.

In this market, if a recruiter goes to source, they go to source for the top of the top. So unless you identify as the top of the top of the market, most likely this is not the strategy you should be going after.

Start with your warm network. Go into LinkedIn connections, click on My Network, search with filters, All Filters, scroll down and find past companies. Once you do that, you will find all the people that you have ever worked with.

Those are your business-class tickets to the roles that are open but may not be advertised to the broader market.

Should you do cold outreach? Absolutely yes. Find 50 top companies that you want to work with, and even if there are no open roles, still reach out.

But don’t reach out to recruiters. They will never answer you. They’re already overwhelmed with hundreds of applications and other admin things.

Instead, reach out to:

→ Design managers

→ Heads of design

→ Product managers

→ Heads of product engineering

→ Engineering managers

Those are the cross-functional stakeholders who are actually interested in finding people.

Also be very smart about propositioning. Don’t just go for full-time roles. Try to get in as a freelancer or contractor. That’s a much easier way to convert yourself into a full-time hire.

We all know it’s not working. To successfully apply, you must seem like the best candidate, truly out of the pile. You need a super strong position, a very good portfolio, and you need to be early.

There is a good chance that within a couple of weeks we will realize the application quality is really bad, go sourcing, take down the role as a hiring team, and you will never hear from us or get an auto-rejection.

A couple of years ago, I created a post and the whole Maven talk on it. It’s as relevant now as it was back then in 2024.

See the talk

(Disclaimer: If you sign up for a talk, I will be adding you to my newsletter and email list so you never miss these types of materials ever again)

Anyways, after I shared all of that, the person answered me :

Seems a bit complicated, very manual, very demanding. I’m not sure that I want to do that

Well, guess what: finding a new role IS demanding right now.

Let’s forget what was happening in 2019, 2020, 2021. It’s a different market, and the market is not going to change.

I am not seeing in any foreseeable future that companies will stop laying off and start hiring like crazy.

The market depends a lot on geopolitical conditions, and they get worse day by day.

You expecting that applications will start working again is the same as you using a BlackBerry phone right now and saying the iPhone is going to fail.

Of course, it’s your right, but it doesn’t mean it’s the right way to go.

Hope this article inspires you to diversify your ways of finding a new role.

Good luck and read you soon,

Lena